To read these words, light is first refracted by the cornea, through the pupil in the iris and onto the lens, which focuses images onto the retina. The images are received by light-sensitive cells in the retina, which transmit impulses to the brain. These impulses are carried by a set of neurons called the retinal ganglion cells. Once the impulses reach the brain, the brain then has to piece together the information it receives into an understandable image. All of this happens in a fraction of a second.
Information travels from the retina to the brain via axons – the long, threadlike parts of neurons – sent out by the retinal ganglion cells. During embryonic development, axons are sent out to find their specific targets in the brain, so that images can be processed.
For an axon in a growing embryo, the journey from retina to brain is not a straightforward one. It’s a very long way for a tiny axon, through a constantly changing series of environments that it has never encountered before. So how do axons know where to go, and what can it tell us about how the brain is made and maintained?
Two University of Cambridge researchers, Professor Christine Holt of the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, and Dr Stephen Eglen of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, are taking two different, but complementary, approaches to these questions.
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Image: A growing axon tip exhibits polarised mRNA translation (red)
Credit: K-M. Leung
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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The amazing axon adventure
8 February 2016
How does the brain make connections, and how does it maintain them? Cambridge neuroscientists and mathematicians are using a variety of techniques to understand how the brain ‘wires up’, and what it might be able to tell us about degeneration in later life.